April 8, 2008

Every now and then a set of technologies gets twisted together by a small group of dedicated people, and a new industry is born — a watershed event that demonstrates a new way of thinking about things, and throws out a lot of old rules.

There are a three that are coming together to trigger another watershed.

The first is open, popular, mobile Internet devices. Think Blackberry, iPhone, or the slew of new MIDs that Intel showed off a few days ago in Shanghai. These are built around the assumption of ubiquitous access to the Internet, high resolution displays, multimedia capabilities, and a bit of horsepower under the hood. Any college student can get their hands on the Android or iPhone or Windows Mobile SDKs and build a hot little application in their spare time.

The second is web services. It doesn’t matter if it’s WS* or REST or XML or JSON — the point is being able to query and manipulate data at a distance, with open protocols across public and private networks. Pick your web framework of choice … building a web service is almost a drag and drop process today.

The third and final piece is cheap and scalable cloud computing. The physical infrastructure capable of serving billions of transactions is available to anyone with a credit card and a little spare time on the weekend. Amazon’s Web Services, Google’s App Engine, and a slew of smaller providers sell scalable computing and bandwidth by the hour and gigabyte.

These three fit together to form a fundamentally different picture of mobile computing: light weight applications that fit in your pocket that take advantage of the local hardware, but seamlessly tap into “Internet scale” computing power and storage.

I’ve talked with a dozen entrepreneurs in as many months who are exploring these waters. Streaming media (push and pull), information discovery and analysis, mobile social interactions, and location aware applications all depend on this trinity of capabilities. I’m just one guy in a groundswell of people who are looking at the landscape and thinking “hot damn!”

What makes this so exciting is how easy it is to do today. You don’t need a dozen engineers and a multi-million dollar budget. You don’t need to negotiate with a corporate gatekeeper. You don’t need to pitch to VCs. You don’t need to wait.

2009 is going to bring a wave of media rich, location aware, always connected mobile applications to hundreds of millions of people. I’m confident we’ll see a real forehead slapper by the end of 2008 — a tool or service that is painfully obvious, but fundamentally changes how we think about a day to day task. It’ll make a millionaire or two, at the very least.

“The OAuth protocol enables websites or applications (Consumers) to access Protected Resources from a web service (Service Provider) via an API, without requiring Users to disclose their Service Provider credentials to the Consumers. More generally, OAuth creates a freely-implementable and generic methodology for API authentication.

“An example use case is allowing printing service printer.example.com (the Consumer), to access private photos stored on photos.example.net (the Service Provider) without requiring Users to provide their photos.example.net credentials to printer.example.com.”

In other words, you can build an API for your hot new web app, give your customers control who and what gets to use their data, and provide a standard way for the development community to get access to your sandbox.

This sort of thing has been done in an ad hoc manner for years, but a widely embraced open standard is what it takes to get the attention of the big kids. So, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon, folks. This one is worth while.